


fixer upper

by inkteller



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cybertronian Body Language, Developing Friendships, F/F, F/M, Food Issues, Friendship/Love, Light BDSM, Sticky Sexual Interfacing, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-07-31 13:21:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20115763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkteller/pseuds/inkteller
Summary: Windblade has a million and one things on her to-do list. An ex-flame and her apartment's decor are nowherenearthe top. Thankfully, Bumblebee and Starscream have some free time on their hands.





	fixer upper

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MeinongsJungleBook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MeinongsJungleBook/gifts).

> So I started working on this _months_ ago, when I saw [this](https://inkfic.tumblr.com/post/183116288297/puppidoodle-someday-ill-upload-actual-polished) very interesting art on Tumblr. And I got..._an idea._
> 
> So initially it was _supposed_ to be a fake relationship that turned into a real one, helped along by a significant dollop of sexual tension, loosely inspired by one of (my favorite) Georgette Heyer books, _Bath Tangle._ Which I recommend, BTW--if you're into foe-but-secretly-friend-yay, it's a really great romance and even more humor. Georgette Heyer is amazing. 
> 
> Then Bumblebee tapped me on my shoulder and went _'Scuse me.'_ You know, like he does. 
> 
> And so many months later, here we are. This is dedicated to [brandxspandex](https://brandxspandex.tumblr.com/), who was instrumental in showing me that there was actually an audience for this story. It was supposed to be a fake relationship!au, but ended up turning into a weird Chip-and-Joanna-Gaines!fixer upper!au, but thankfully without all the gentrification.

Windblade stole a glance at Starscream’s relaxed frame next to her. He was more content than she had ever seen him, but then again, for the first time in a long time, not only did they not have a crisis staring them in the face, but he was no longer the ruler of Iacon so it wouldn’t be his lot in any case.

No, it would be hers.

They were waiting for the arrival of the Mistress of Flame and her entourage from a newly-integrated Caminus. To save themselves from Unicron, every community based within a metrotitan that could was integrated into Cybertron--it worked, and they beat Unicron. 

The Mistress of Flame had been unhappy that it had been Windblade’s idea, that the Mistress of Flame had been outvoted, and that Windblade had been right. Windblade was delighted at the Mistress of Flame’s seething, although she was too well-behaved to show it.

She would let Starscream show it. He was not at all well-behaved.

The spacebridge--now groundbridge--rippled into blue light in front of them, and Windblade tensed. She might enjoy the Mistress of Flame’s seething, but only in private. She still had to deal with the Mistress of Flame.

When the light died away, the Mistress of Flame stepped forward on Iacon soil. She didn’t bother to acknowledge Windblade as she stepped forward to allow her entourage to step onto Iacon soil after her. Windblade opened her mouth to recite the rote greeting, but the entire world stopped when the last member of the entourage stepped through. 

Slipstream. Oh, _of course._ The Mistress of Flame was angry about Windblade’s plan working--Windblade the failure, Windblade the cityspeaker who tried too hard and cared too much, but now Windblade was responsible for the survival of every single Cybertronian and Cybertronian-adjunct. And the Mistress of Flame had no ground to criticize Windblade _ever_, so instead, to rattle her, bring the ex.

The Mistress of Flame smirked slightly, and Windblade’s audials roared with repressed anger. It was with an effort that she didn’t rev her engine. The effort, however, was enough to change her EM field slightly, and it was Starscream’s turn to glance at her. Her facial plating was fixed, and he moved a little closer to her so that their fields touched. 

She could _feel_ Starscream’s delight when he realized what she was so ang--_annoyed _about. She repressed the urge to roll her optics at him and got on with the necessary greetings. Slipstream wasn’t even looking at her, thank Solus, and maybe it wouldn’t get any worse than that.

\--

Blurr was playing host to the off-duty delegates determined to party. Windblade had decided to make an appearance, and she had dragged Starscream and Bumblebee along. Starscream, because he still needed to be socialized to what ‘normal’ was, and Bumblebee because he would keep Starscream from killing people. Not that Starscream did that kind of thing these days, but it was the principle of the matter. If Starscream ever thought that _she_ thought he was mostly-reformed, he would try to kill the next person who pissed him off just to prove a point.

She needed to make the rounds and greet everyone, and once that was done she could bring drinks to Bumblebee and Starscream. Starscream would complain about the drink until she assured him it wasn’t inebriating, Bumblebee would poke Starscream until he quieted, and then they might actually be able to have a decent night.

She was looking forward to it. 

She was at the bar, waiting for Blurr to get to her, when a familiar faint engine noise told her who her companion was. Without looking over, Windblade said, “Hello, Slipstream.”

Slipstream’s engine purred as she leaned on the bar. “Hello, Windblade. Cybertron has left its mark on you.” She trailed one fingertip down Windblade’s left wing, provoking a shudder from Windblade, and pulled it away to show the dust she had picked up. “You used to care about your appearance.”

“I used to care when I had the time to care,” Windblade said mildly. “Because I didn’t have enough to do.”

Slipsteam’s painted mouth curled into a sneer, and Windblade’s spark spun in its casing. She and Slipstream had never been very good together, but the interfacing had always been _fantastic,_ with its undertones of impatience and condescension. “And now you do?” the faint sneer in Slipstream’s voice was audible, and Windblade’s wings straightened.

Windblade’s implication--that Slipstream hadn’t been enough to keep her occupied--clearly stung the other flyer, and Windblade was falling back into the game they had always played, of one-upmanship and petty humiliations. It was so easy. “More than ever,” Windblade said coolly.

Slipstream looked around the bar in her most exaggerated manner, her lips twisting into a malicious smirk. “You were always one to channel all of your frustration into your work,” Slipstream remarked. “You still stink of self-service. No willing amica endura?”

“Windblade,” Starscream barked as he joined her, “Bumblebee wants to get a game of trivia started and you have to save me from it. No one likes it when I win.”

Slipstream looked Starscream up and down before she started to laugh. “Ah, trivia, the last resort of the truly desperate,” she said, just loud enough for Windblade to hear.

Windblade snapped.

“It’s so _kind_ of you to continue to take an interest in my affairs,” Windblade said, copying Starscream’s loftiest manner, the one he used when he was actively _trying_ to wind up everyone around him, “and I _do_ appreciate it, but our bonds are broken and I have new ones now.” She reached down without looking and took Starscream’s hand. He jerked a little, but didn’t otherwise say anything--_please play along, PLEASE play along_\--as Windblade added, “Besides, your belief that trivia is the last resort of the desperate proves that you’ve never seen how intriguing it can be.” 

Starscream cleared his vocalizer. “Oh, you’ve _never_ seen Windblade when she gets intent and determined to prove us all wrong,” he said, proving once again that he was her favorite (except for Chromia). (And Metroplex). (And--you know what, it didn’t really matter except that he was her favorite right then and there, because he was playing along and Slipstream’s smirk was sliding off her facial plating like wet paint). “And Bumblebee’s getting antsy.”

“We can’t have that,” Windblade agreed with the most lascivious smirk she ever attempted. Slipstream was buying it completely, her optics wide and mouth slightly open. Windblade had never seen her speechless, and it was something to savor. “It was good to see you again,” she told Slipstream, as viciously kind as she had ever been, and it felt _good._ “Enjoy Cybertron!”

Starscream tugged on her hand and towed from the bar back to the alcove table that Bumblebee was in, curled over his datapad. He looked up as they both approached. “No drinks.”

“We can have drinks at my place,” Windblade said, conscious of Slipstream’s optics on her back and wings, “but I need to leave with you both _right now_.”

Bumblebee, Solus bless him, immediately got to his pedes as he put away his datapad. “Why? Did something happen?” His optics landed on Starscream and Windblade’s joined hands, and to her shock, he beamed. “Finally! I’ve been waiting for you two to get your scrap together.”

“We can discuss this without onlookers,” Starscream said tersely as he pulled both Bumblebee and Windblade out the door. Blurr waved from his knot of customers and Windblade started to wave back before Starscream tugged on her arm and out the door. 

“What do you mean, _finally_?” Windblade demanded once they were in the slightly cooler, emptier night air. She turned her optics on Starscream. Bumblebee had been his companion for a long time, and she didn’t know fully how much _companionship_ that had entailed, but Bumblebee knew things she didn’t and probably would never understand. “I just--needed to get away from my ex.”

Bumblebee’s optics dimmed in disappointment. “So you made something up?” 

His disappointment was oddly uncomfortable, like she had let him down personally or something. “N-no, I implied.”

“It was beautiful,” Starscream said shortly, _still_ towing them along, “it was almost like she had been taking lessons.”

Starscream wasn’t looking at either of them, and Windblade’s optics brightened in understanding, before guilt set in. The merge they had shared had left them with a spark-deep knowledge of where the other one was at all times, but nothing else, really. At least, not on her end. Transference was always possible in merges, it was why cityspeakers trained for so long so that they didn’t catch themselves starting to think like the Titans they worked with.

That didn’t mean Starscream had the same training. She reached for him with her free hand. “Starscream, I--.”

“Drinks sound _really good_,” he said loudly. “Please tell me you have more than just the drab Camien stuff.”

Windblade took the subject-change with grace. “It is not _drab_, it is _triple-filtered engex_ that I stole from Nautica before the _Lost Light_ left last time and it is sunshine on your glossa, thank you very much!”

“Drab,” Starscream decreed as they approached her apartment building. “Pure dreck.”

“Since you don’t really drink, I don’t think I should have to listen to you,” Windblade stuck her olfactory sensor in the air. “Bumblebee, have you had it?”

“I’ve not had the pleasure,” Bumblebee said, his mouth twitching, “I suppose I could be the impartial judge.”

“There,” Windblade said triumphantly, “a _contest._” Then she frowned. “I don’t think I have a bottle of Cybertronian engex.”

“I do,” Starscream said in his most long-suffering way as he pulled a bottle of Blurr’s best from his subspace. 

Windblade gasped. “You stole it?”

“You always think the worst of me,” Starscream complained.

“That’s not a denial.”

Starscream turned to meet her optics at last as he stuck his glossa out at her. “How will I know if I can still commit crimes if I don’t actually do any for a while? Besides, it isn’t like he’ll notice. Too many loud, demanding customers tonight.”

“You’re not supposed to be committing crimes,” Windblade fussed, “it’s a condition of your parole.”

He brandished the bottle of violently purple engex at her as she scanned her ID card to get them into her building. “So report me.”

If they were actually together, she would reach out, grab his helm, and drag him into a kiss instead, but she didn’t want to make his transference worse. Instead, she frowned at him. “Don’t bait me.”

Starscream rolled his optics and stepped into her building, with her and Bumblebee close behind. He knew how to get to the turbolifts, and he even knew her floor--14. “Did you memorize my address?” she demanded as the turbolift whirred quietly under their pedes.

Starscream waved her off.

“He did,” Bumblebee confirmed with a smirk, “he wanted to make sure your building was safe.”

“Bumblebee,” Starscream growled as the pneumatic doors hissed open and they went down the hall to Unit 23. 

Bumblebee ignored Starscream. “That it had power and everything.” 

They both had to wait for her to flash her ID at her door, which, thank _Solus_, if Starscream had a key to her apartment she would never sleep well again. 

Both Starscream and Bumblebee paused at the threshold of her apartment as she palmed her ID back into her subspace and went looking for her engex. “You can come in, you know,” she said, a little exasperated, as she found the gently-glowing blue bottle and three glasses. “Nothing’s going to bite you.”

“I don’t think anything can,” Starscream said as he and Bumblebee finally entered her apartment. The door hissed shut behind them. “There’s nothing _to _bite me.”

Windblade turned around with bottle and glasses in her hands. “Just because you live in clutter,” she started.

“This isn’t even minimalism,” Starscream said, “this is--_asceticism._” He sniffed. “You clearly need some interior design help.”

Windblade looked around her apartment. She had the bare necessities of furniture--a table, a few chairs, and in her private room, a berth with a small desk that held her paints and brushes, but she didn’t need more than that. “It’s fine!”

“It’s as drab as your engex,” Starscream informed her as he slid into one of her chairs and draped his frame over it like he was doing it a favor. “I’ll block out some time to help you, get some paint on these walls.”

“Starscream,” Bumblebee chided, “she’s ruler of Cybertron now, she doesn’t have time for that.” He beamed at Windblade. “It can be a project for us so that she can do the hard work!”

“I didn’t ask,” Windblade started again, but Starscream talked over her _again_.

“She’ll need furniture too, something more comfortable than this,” Starscream made a face, “I have _seen_ Camien furniture, you cannot blame your lack of taste on your upbringing.” To Bumblebee, he said, “In Caminus, if it’s not overly gilded it’s not worth putting on your wall.”

“Camien interior design is _not_ overly gilded--.”

“You just need a project,” Bumblebee interrupted, his optics flashing at Windblade, “something to keep you from stealing Blurr’s good stuff.”

Starscream’s optics brightened. “I could steal good furniture!”

“No, we’re not doing that,” Windblade said firmly.

“Bespoke or mass-manufactured?” Bumblebee mused.

“Oh, bespoke, of _course_,” Starscream sneered at Bumblebee. “We need to hide her lack of taste.”

“I have taste,” Windblade protested.

“No, my dear,” Starscream said, the endearment slipping out again. He had used it once, during one of their seemingly-infinite crises, and since the merge, it had slipped out more and more. She liked it, coming from him. “What you have is _no_ taste, which is easier to fix than _bad_ taste.” He reached out and patted the top of her hand. “We’ll start with _good_ Cybertronian engex.”

He grabbed the glasses from in front of her and uncapped the bottle of the Cybertronian engex, pouring healthy amounts into two of the glasses. One went to her, the other to Bumblebee. She didn’t argue--Starscream really _didn’t_ drink--as she picked up her glass. Bumblebee held his up, and they clinked the glasses together before taking a sip.

Windblade didn’t really mind Cybertronian engex, but she preferred Camien engex. Still, for the look of the thing, she rolled her mouthful of engex around her glossa and made sure to look deeply contemplative.

Starscream tapped the edge of his pede on the floor as he waited for her and Bumblebee to finish. Windblade swallowed her engex as Bumblebee did. “Not bad,” she said, “mine’s better.”

Starscream bared his denta in one of his more affectionate threatening gestures. “Do try.”

Bumblebee pushed his glass over to her, and she unscrewed the top from her bottle and pouring some of her engex into the remaining empty glass. “No need to get the two confused,” she said airily as she passed him back his glass. She tipped back her own and finished the last of the engex Starscream had given her.

Blurr distilled his own engex, and it kicked like a combiner. She kept her facial plating set by sheer effort, and her spark whirled in its casing before it settled again. Bumblebee was rolling the Camien engex in her mouth, his optics dimmed in contemplation, and she watched his throat cables move as he swallowed. “I have to give it to her,” he told Starscream, “Camien engex _is_ better.”

The look of outrage on Starscream’s was delightful, and she made sure to take a screen capture with her HUD so that she could peruse it at leisure. “How dare you,” Starscream said, “How _dare_ you insult Cybertronian engex this way.” He pounded the table for emphasis.

Windblade giggled as Bumblebee tried to explain the differences and poured the Camien engex into her glass. Starscream kept proclaiming what an insult it was as Bumblebee got more and more tongue-tied, and finally she put down her glass and said, “Bumblebee, he just wants an excuse to be outraged, stop giving him one.”

Starscream turned on her, as expected, and pouted. She wanted to reach out and run one of her fingers over his lower lip, proof she was more overcharged than she thought. “I am not looking for an excuse, I am actually, purely, outraged and it is _more_ of an outrage that you think I’m looking for something—mmpfh!”

She had placed her hand over his mouth and locked optics with him. “That’s enough,” she said serenely. With her hand still on Starscream’s mouth—she could feel the vibrations of him clearing his vocalizer—she turned to Bumblebee and smiled. “So, heard anything interesting?”

Bumblebee’s optics were sparkling with good humor. “Can I have a refill?” he held up his glass. “The Camien stuff goes down easy.”

Windblade beamed. With the hand not holding Starscream’s mouth closed, she picked up the bottle of Camien engex and gently angled it to fill up Bumblebee’s glass. When she had topped it off, she looked at Starscream. “If I let you go, will you stop looking for a reason to be outraged?”

He bit her. The angle wasn’t good, but the nip against the more flexible part of her hand, near her wrist gears, went straight to her interface panel, but she shook Starscream just a little. “That wasn’t an answer.”

He rolled his optics, but his wings folded down, and that was enough. She removed her hand from his mouth and wiped it down the outer part of her thigh plating. “Would you like a drink?” she asked gingerly. She didn’t know why he rarely drank, and she didn’t want to play into anything if it was important.

Starscream considered it, and then the fight drained from him. “A little bit—of the _Cybertronian _stuff. Unlike some, I have societal pride,” he scowled at Bumblebee, who hid his smile in the rim of his glass.

Windblade took Bumblebee’s abandoned glass and drizzled just a little bit into the bottom. Starscream took it and swirled the glass in his hand before he asked, “Your ex? Who is she?”

“Slipstream,” Windblade said as she topped off her glass. “She’s an energon seeker in the Camien Interstellar Corps. When we met, we were both in training.” She shrugged. “Slipstream’s constant trips prolonged a relationship that probably wouldn’t have lasted longer than a few stellar cycles if she had been planetside.”

“Energon seeker?” Bumblebee frowned a little.”Was she ever successful?”

“Sometimes, but it was never enough. We had a running bet about who would save Caminus first—her or me.” Windblade smirked. “I won.”

“What was the penalty?” Starscream asked as he sipped from the glass. Despite Windblade watching him, she didn’t see the amount of engex in the glass get any less. She sighed and made a mental note to retrieve a glass of regular energon for Starscream in a minute. 

“It doesn’t matter now,” Windblade answered. “It was really only relevant within the context of our relationship.”

“So, interfacing, then,” Starscream said to Bumblebee. Bumblebee’s audials heated as Starscream went on, “Did you bet on who would get to top?”

“It wasn’t exactly _topping_,” Windblade said, aware that she was definitely past her usual limits. “More about…other things.”

Starscream propped his chin in his hand. “Like what?”

“I’m good,” Bumblebee said. “Really.”

“Slipstream has a major wing kink,” Windblade explained, “and she wanted to involve some chains and things.”

Starscream’s optics brightened. “I tried that once.”

Windblade focused on him. “Really? I was never fully sure, because the wing hinges can be so delicate and if you get startled, I feel like you could do some major damage.”

“You don’t put the chains around the hinges,” Starscream explained. Between them, Bumblebee was slowly dying of embarrassment. “There are a kind of flexible metal clamp that you put on them, made of—copper, those were the ones I used—and then you can change the clamp and run a slight electrical current through it.”

Windblade’s turbines turned once as she thought about it. “And the chains?”

“Keep the wings together,” Starscream said sagely. “That way, it prevents those kinds of accidents you’re afraid off.”

Windblade’s turbines whirred as she considered it. “You would have to really trust your partner,” she mused.

“Not always,” Starscream said, in that too-honest way he sometimes had. 

Windblade lost interest in their conversation. “Like I said, it never got that far.”

“Do fliers often have a wing kink?” Bumblebee asked delicately.

“Yes,” Windblade and Starscream chorused. The merge had caused that too—the same thought. Not always, thank Solus, but often enough that Windblade often placed Starscream further down the table from her during Council meetings. The distance seemed to prevent the worst of it.

Bumblebee looked a little disturbed.

Starscream rolled his optics. “As if grounders don’t have similar kinks. I’ve seen the Constructions drool over Prowl’s door-wings.”

“That’s not—everyone,” Bumblebee said faintly.

Windblade pointed at Starscream. “No, tires. Chromia told me once how much she liked it when her partners played with her tires.”

Bumblebee’s engine screamed with embarrassment, and as Starscream took the opportunity to further deepen Bumblebee’s embarrassment and perhaps _actually_ cause him pump failure, Windblade got up to get Starscream a glass of regular energon. She had a full cabinet of all the different additives, things that weren’t available on Caminus and added bright, vibrant flavors to the unfamiliar pink energon. 

She wasn’t sure what Starscream liked in his energon—he almost never ate around anyone, maybe a holdover from his time in the Decepticons and fear of poison. She settled on plain energon, but she took a long stirrer from her drawers and assembled a few small containers of the more popular additives she had seen Cybertronians use. Small crystals of blue, purple, and green shimmered in the small glass bowls, and she brought them all over to him. Maybe if she learned what he liked, she could fix it for him.

She held in a snort at the thought. Starscream would never trust anyone to mix together his preference. He didn’t trust anyone that much.

Starscream’s optics brightened a little when she placed the tall glass of glowing energon in front of him. “I don’t know what you like,” she said, a little awkwardly. She shoved the small plate holding the bowls toward him. 

“So for someone with no interior taste, we discover you are in fact a _gourmand_,” Starscream said as he dropped two of the green crystals into the energon and stirred them. She didn’t know what the last word was—he had dropped into a language she didn’t recognize.

Bumblebee recognized the confusion in her eyes and said, helpfully, “Someone with very specific tastes regarding food. Let me guess, Caminus didn’t have this?”

“Not like it is in Cybertron,” she admitted as she poured another refill for Bumblebee and herself. “The amount of what was available was…overwhelming, at first.” She didn’t say about how her first two months had been a struggle not to fill her tanks every time she saw energon, or all of her experiments with the different additives until she had filled her cabinets with everything she liked.

She had never had dessert until she came to Cybertron. It had become an obsession.

“When we first re-energized the planet,” Starscream said abruptly after he had sipped his energon, “there was a mad dash for everyone to eat, all the time. I was afraid that we might cause a second shortage just from ‘bots eating what hadn’t been available for millennia. Thankfully, that was not the case.”

Starscream caught and held her optics for a long moment. For a moment, she saw empathy for her in his optics, and it startled her. He knew what it had been like to be hungry, to have empty tanks that cramped until your frame began to cannibalize itself in an attempt to feel satisfied. She nodded once in acknowledgement, and Starscream refocused on Bumblebee.

“Sooo,” Starscream drawled out the invitation, “what _are_ your kinks, _dear_ Bumblebee? You hung around me long enough to know _my_ foibles,” he grimaced as he said it.

“I’m not having this conversation with you,” Bumblebee said with drunken dignity. 

“I know about you and Thundercracker,” Starscream said, almost idly.

“Am I going to get to meet him at some point?” Windblade wondered. She grinned at Bumblebee. “I’m sure he has _plenty_ of Starscream stories.”

“Oh, so many,” Bumblebee agreed.

Starscream tapped the tips of his fingers on her table. “Excuse me, I asked you a question.”

“And I refused to answer. Easy math.” Bumblebee turned to Windblade. “So what would your ex do if you demanded to collect since you technically won that bet?”

“Probably swear at me at length,” Windblade said, almost fondly. “We both thought it would be her to save the planet.”

“What a shock for her,” Starscream murmured. 

Bumblebee yawned. “Better go home before I turn into a pumpkin,” he said apologetically. 

Windblade furrowed her facial plating. Once again, his Cybertronian had lapsed into a language she didn’t know. “Punkin?” she repeated.

“Pump-kin,” Starscream corrected. “It’s a kind of Earth growth, very round and orange.” He glared at Bumblebee. “There’s an Earth folk tale about it.”

“Oh,” Windblade shrugged. “Maybe Marissa will explain it to me when she’s here next.”

“You shouldn’t drive home overcharged,” Starscream fussed at Bumblebee. “You still aren’t used to driving through Metroplex.”

“I would offer you a berth, but I don’t have a spare one,” Windblade said apologetically. “I moved in here after Chromia left.”

“I’m not that overcharged,” Bumblebee assured them. He patted his abdominal plating. “Ratchet gave me a filter that burns through engex faster than normal. It remained after that weird inter-dimensional trip that I did.”

Starscream still didn’t look happy, so Bumblebee reached out and patted Starscream’s hand. “I’ll come see you in the morning and show you I still have all limbs attached,” he said fondly. “Good night, Windblade.”

Windblade smiled at him and walked him to the door. When he was gone, she realized that he had left her and Starscream alone, and she wasn’t sure how she felt about that. To give herself some time, she picked up the two bottles of engex and returned them to her engex cabinet, and when she returned, Starscream had gone to the huge glass doors that marked her living space from her balcony. “This was why you moved here,” he said abruptly as she joined him. The stars above Cybertron twinkled, and Luna 2 glowed. “The balcony.”

“It was the main factor,” she admitted. “The last place, it was on the ground, which made it easier for Chromia to secure, but I never liked it.”

“Would you move again once she comes back?”

Windblade considered the question. It was hard—her brain module was hazy with engex—but she finally said, “No, I don’t think so. I like the height. Caminus always felt like it was pressing me down, but Cybertron has open skies.”

“Hmph,” Starscream said as he drained his energon. 

“I’m sorry,” she said in a rush, and blamed it on the engex. “About the transference. It’s a risk of merging, and we’re taught how not to fall into it, but it’s done at the coding level of our brain module and I didn’t mean for that to happen to you and I’m sorry.”

Starscream gave her a strange look. “You think I’m dealing with _transference?_”

“You’re…not?”

He snorted. “My dear Windblade, if I was impacted by transference every time I did something dangerous with another person, I would have more conjunx endura than Chromedome.” 

“Oh. Well, that’s good,” she said.

Starscream slanted a look at her. “You’re not going to ask me what I _am_ dealing with?”

“I thought you saved your spark-sharing for Bumblebee,” she said with a touch of acid.

Starscream snorted, and a flicker of pleasure went through her circuits. She rarely made him laugh—genuinely laugh. “He won’t listen to me about this anymore.”

“Oh.” She looked at his empty glass. “Would you like some more?”

“No,” he said. “There’s something else I want.”

Windblade racked her mind for what that might be. “I can order take-out, I can’t promise how good it is, I prefer to mix my own energon—.”

He laughed once. “You’re so ridiculous.”

She drew away from him a little. “I am _not_.”

“You are.” He shook his head and looked out her windows. “We can have this conversation later. Is there a specific door-code for this side?”

“Are you safe to fly?” she asked, already palming her doors open.

He looked at her and briefly dimmed his optics. “My dear Windblade, _you_ were drinking. Not me.” Then he was gone. 

—

When Windblade got to her office after a too-long Council meeting, she found Slipstream waiting for her. “I did not invite you,” she said automatically, even as she punched in the code to unlock her door. 

“No, you didn’t,” Slipstream agreed. She was beginning to smirk, and Windblade’s fingers itched. “Can I come in anyway?”

Windblade rolled her optics and gestured in front of her. If someone had set a trap, better it took out Slipstream than her. 

Unfortunately, there was no trap and Slipstream took in the office with interested optics as Windblade locked her door and set her personal comm. channel to ‘Busy.’ It wouldn’t stop Starscream or Optimus Prime, but it should at least get her a hail from anyone else who needed her. 

“This doesn’t seem like your taste at _all,”_ Slipstream commented as she gestured to the walls. 

“I inherited it,” Windblade said. “I haven’t had the chance to redecorate yet. Been too busy. You’re not here to admire my etchings.”

“No,” Slipstream said. She turned to Windblade, that damned smirk back in place. She sauntered toward Windblade, and Windblade cleared her vocalizer.

“Oh.”

“Yes, ‘_oh._’” Slipstream mocked. 

“You’re not offering to interface with me because the Mistress of Flame asked you to, are you?” Windblade demanded, deeply suspicious.

Slipstream shook her head. “I mean, I’m not offering, I’m _telling_, but no, that ancient creaking gilded rust bot doesn’t even know I’m here. She wouldn’t approve—she wanted me to here to ‘study Cybertronian energization methods.’” Slipstream always believed in liberal uses of air quotes. “She wants to detach Caminus from Cybertron as soon as it’s possible, engineering-wise.”

That was a legitimately useful piece of information. Windblade eyed Slipstream. “She thinks I’m a bad influence?”

“A cause of apostasy,” Slipstream agreed. Her smirk widened. “Wanna show me how you do it?”

Windblade snarled and leapt forward, pinning her to the ruby-red wall. Their lip plating met with a clang and sparks, and Slipstream’s engine roared as their panels ground against each other. Windblade bit down on Slipstream’s lower lip plating, and Slipstream growled as she flipped them around. Windblade may have been in dangerous situations, but Slipstream’s frame had been designed for the threats of deep-space travel and she always could flip the tables on her. 

Windblade fanned her wings outward to press against the wall and provide better leverage. Slipstream released her lip plating to attack her neck cables, and Windblade’s turbines echoed Slipstream’s engines. “Is your office soundproofed?” Slipstream hissed.

“Yes,” Windblade said. Starscream had ensured it back when he ruled Cybertron, but she had never needed it until today. 

“Good.” Slipstream sank her teeth into one of Windblade’s thicker neck cables, and Windblade blindly grasped for the edge of one of Slipstream’s wings and squeezed it. Slipstream hissed in pain, her exhalation washing warm air over the bruised cable. “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

“Try and stop me,” Windblade snarled. She twisted the hand holding Slipstream’s wing and used the momentum from her turbines to push Slipstream off her. Slipstream grabbed her arm and the two of them fell to the floor in a clatter of plating, and Windblade hit the floor first. She groaned, her struts aching from the fall, and Slipstream straddled her. 

“I forgot how much you love a fight,” Slipstream said, her chest plating rising and falling as she exhaled her excess heat from her mouth. “Is that how you met your amica endura?”

“My amica—no, of course not.” Windblade bucked her hips, but Slipstream was heavier. “Are you _jealous_?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Slipstream scoffed.

“I’m getting tired of being called ridiculous,” Windblade muttered.

“Get used to it,” Slipstream advised as she ran her palm down Windblade’s interface panel. Windblade made an embarrassed noise as it opened in a flash. “Oh, it _has_ been a while for you.”

“Been busy running Cybertron. How much do you think the Mistress of Flame overloads?”

Slipstream made a face. “Rather not think about it. Oh, there we are.” She ran her fingertips over Windblade’s spike, and Windblade’s hips bucked again. “I forgot how sensitive you are.”

“Do something.”

“Ah-ah,” Slipstream said, waving a finger in front of Windblade’s face. “I’m in charge.”

Windblade jerked her head up and bit Slipstream’s finger. Slipstream yowled before she retracted her finger and slapped Windblade in the face. It wasn’t hard, but Windblade gasped anyway. “If it’s too much, you know what to say,” Slipstream said smugly. 

Windblade looked back at Slipstream, her optics blazing. “If you’re going to touch me, actually _touch_ me.” She gripped Slipstream’s hand on her spike and shoved her hips up. Slipstream’s optics widened, and Windblade used Slipstream’s distraction to continue to thrust up into their hands. 

Slipstream’s rudeness and control always caused Windblade to run closer to the edge of her control than she was comfortable with, and Slipstream was right, damn her optics—it _had_ been a long time, so it did not take long for Windblade’s back struts to arch as charge rippled through her spike and to the receptors in hers and Slipstream’s hand. Slipstream groaned and tightened her grip further to ease Windblade through her overload. 

“Solus,” she gasped out when the last crackles of charge had faded. “How are you not getting laid?”

“Roll over and you’ll find out who’s doing the laying,” Windblade said, still angry, and with no effort at all, she rolled them over. 

Slipstream was pleased to learn just what Windblade had meant.

—

After that…meeting, Windblade realized the day was a wash when her first meeting of the day was with some of the engineers and they all made horribly embarrassed faces once they realized why her office stunk of ozone. Windblade excused them as quickly as possible—they were more than happy to flee—and changed her internal comms icon to read ‘Not Available.’ It wasn’t perfect, but it should at least give her the time to get back to her quarters and clean off the smell of interfacing. 

Windblade didn’t bother to go in the grounder way for her apartment building, instead landing directly on her balcony and badging in. She slid the glass doors aside and was going to make a beeline for her wash racks, but she had forgotten something very important.

Starscream and Bumblebee had decided to redecorate her apartment. Moreover, they had decided to redecorate her apartment and had somehow talked their way _into her apartment._

Windblade stared at Bumblebee, jotting down things on a datapad, and at Starscream, who had a measuring tape. They stared at her in return, and then Starscream very obviously sniffed the air, and Windblade wanted to offline immediately.

“You owe me fifty credits,” Starscream informed Bumblebee.

“You don’t know who her partner was,” Bumblebee retorted.

“No one else would try,” Starscream sneered. He looked Windblade up and down and then pointed at her thigh plating. “Besides, paint transfers.”

Windblade hadn’t thought embarrassment could _actually_ cause pump failure, but Solus was providing her with all sorts of new insights.

“No one else would try because they don’t want to get in your way,” Bumblebee grumbled as he fished a fifty-credit-chip out of his subspace and slammed it into Starscream’s waiting palm. 

Windblade frowned. “Excuse me, what?”

“Oh, you didn’t know?” Bumblebee’s face twisted into a truly wicked smirk. “Any bot that Starscream suspected of having _intentions_ toward you would get called up to his office—.” 

“Finish that and I will cause you pain,” Starscream intoned.

“And warned that continued interest in you would result in very high taxes and possibly an investigation into their black market dealings.”

Windblade watched, dumbfounded, as Starscream attempted to garrote Bumblebee’s head from his neck with the measuring tape. “I’m going to—leave you to your argument,” she said, and fled to the wash racks. Drowning couldn’t kill Camiens, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t try. 

An attempted, but unsuccessful, drowning later, Windblade exited her wash racks to find that Bumblebee and Starscream were apparently friends again, and debating paint colors. “I don’t want dark colors,” she said awkwardly, sidestepping them to get to her energon. 

“You don’t get a say,” Starscream said reflexively.

“It’s my apartment. Mine is the _only_ say.”

Starscream opened his mouth, but Bumblebee held up his hand. “She’s the one who has to see it every day, Starscream.” He cleared his vocalizer and held up different paint configurations. “Dark colors aren’t too bad as long as they don’t dominate the space.”

Windblade glanced at the paint sheets as she stirred purple crystals into her energon. “The teal is pretty.”

“Imagine my surprise,” Starscream said as he dimmed his optics. “That wouldn’t be because it’s on your frame, isn’t it?”

“That’s how I know it’s pretty,” Windblade said sweetly. 

“So your colors don’t have any especial meaning?” Bumblebee inquired. 

“Do _yours_?”

“No, I guess not,” Bumblebee looked back at Windblade’s walls and the starkness of her apartment. “Have you not decorated because you haven’t had time or because you’re afraid of permanency?”

Windblade stared at Bumblebee. “What?” she managed.

“He does that,” Starscream said from across the room. During his failed garroting of Bumblebee, he had snagged Bumblebee’s datapad and was jotting down further measurements. “He says nothing for a _really_ long time and then pops out with—that,” Starscream brandished a stylus in Bumblebee’s direction, “it’s _really_ annoying.”

“I can’t help it if I pick up a few things here and there,” Bumblebee said innocently. 

It did not convince Windblade. “…Right.” Her wings jerked slightly as she tried to marshal her thoughts together. “I was never sure if I could stay,” she said finally. “Once Metroplex had been fixed up, I didn’t—I didn’t know if I could stay.”

Bumblebee turned to glare at Starscream. Starscream shrugged his wings at them both and took up the tape measure again. “So what changed?” he asked, still glaring at Starscream.

“The Mistress of Flame showed who she was,” Starscream said. “Well. Showed _you_,” he told Windblade. “The rest of us already had an inkling,” he hitched his wings up at his most arrogant. Windblade longed to throw something at his head but didn’t have anything at hand.

“Liar,” Bumblebee said affectionately. “You don’t trust anyone but even you were taken by surprise by the depths of her fanaticism.” 

“You will find me feeling no sympathy for you,” Starscream informed Windblade, “because you tried to use her fanaticism against me, thank you very much for that.”

“I thought it was the right call at the time!” Windblade protested. “It wasn’t like I was aware of your other sides at the time. Every time I’d met with you up to that point you had been super creepy toward me. Did you forget the whole ‘planting a hand on my current, still-healing _major wound?_”

“Get over it,” Starscream dismissed. “Everyone does that.”

“No they don’t!” Bumblebee and Windblade chorused.

Starscream glanced at them and dimmed his optics for a moment. “They do in the world _I_ came from.”

“Further proof that your world was fragged up and it shouldn’t have happened,” Bumblebee said. “Anyway, you can’t blame Windblade for making the call she did, based on the information she had at the time.”

“I can absolutely blame her.”

“Do you still blame me?” Windblade asked quietly. 

“Now it’s _your_ turn to play Bumblebee,” Starscream said nastily. She waited—he lashed out to hide how he was feeling. She had learned not to take it at face-value. “No, not anymore,” he said reluctantly in the face of her implacability. “Your banishment and being declared a non-person was a pretty fair punishment for that betrayal.”

“Pretty fair?” Windblade choked on the words. She missed Caminus more than she could have ever found the words for, but it was a _fair_ punishment in his mind?

“Starscream,” Bumblebee said pointedly. “You hadn’t exactly given her a reason to be loyal.”

Starscream pouted but didn’t say anything more. Bumblebee turned to Windblade and said, “He has no idea of what makes a ‘fair’ versus ‘unfair’ punishment. If you were to ask me, I’d say that using Optimus to open up Caminus was a _fair_ response to being tortured.”

“It didn’t cause lasting damage!” Starscream protested.

“That’s not important,” Bumblebee said.

“Ultimately, we have torture, betrayal, banishment, and blame between us,” Windblade observed. “Yet here you are, measuring my walls for—something.” She sat down in one of her chairs and propped her chin in her hand. “Are you going to tell me what it is?”

“No, that would ruin the surprise,” Starscream put down the datapad. “So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that maybe we should stop hurting each other,” Windblade said. “Just maybe.”

“Sounds ridiculous,” Starscream said flatly. 

She lifted her wings up in a shrug. “Will you people ever _stop_ calling me ridiculous?”

Bumblebee and Starscream said in unison, “Probably not.”

She stuck her glossa out at them and drank her energon.

—

“It has been reported to our news site today that our newly-elected leader has been caught interfacing in her office. Her partner—or _partners_—remain unknown, but the question remains: is this really what we elected Cityspeaker Windblade for? We all pay our taxes,and for that, is it so unfair to expect a certain amount of professionalism in the office of our leader?”

“Turn it off,” Windblade said from the shelter of her arms, where she had been hiding her face through the last ten minutes of the broadcast. “It’s the same message over and over again: I disgraced myself.”

Blurr turned off the holo-screen and poured her a healthy slug of his own brew with his other hand. “You have to think of it like this,” he said, at his most friendly. Windblade was instantly on her guard—Blurr did sarcastic fondness _much_ better than friendly. “After Starscream and what a trainwreck _he_ was—no, I don’t think I need to explain the term ‘train wreck’ to you—you’ve been scandal-free. You keep your head down, you do your job, and there haven’t exactly been any major calamities since the Unicorn mess. The gossipmongers have been bored stiff. You want to believe Optimus Prime never got up to anything,” he adopted an overly-formal tone he _had_ to have borrowed from Ultra Magnus, “_unsavory_ in the bridge of whatever ship he was currently on? Feel free, but you’d be wrong.” He dimmed a single optic at her in a wink. “Let them make as much as they can of this for the next news cycle, and then something will come up and everyone will go back to thinking you’re semi-divine. Just don’t do it again.”

“Just don’t do what again?” Bumblebee asked as he pushed the door open with his cane. “Blurr, when are you getting sliding doors?”

“When people stop having fights in my bar,” Blurr retorted, “and interfacing in her office. Windblade’s not doing that again.”

“You’re not? But that’s the best part of the job,” Bumblebee eased onto the stool next to Windblade and hung the curve of his cane from the edge of the bar.

“And you’d know?” Windblade said sulkily. 

“Well--I—um—.” Bumblebee swallowed and tapped his fingers on the bar top. “Blurr, some of your best?”

“He fucked Metalhawk,” Blurr informed Windblade as he poured two fingers worth of his energon into a glass and passed it to Bumblebee. “Surprised he didn’t fuck Starscream.”

Bumblebee simultaneously inhaled his energon and spilled it all over himself. “Yeah,” he spluttered, “shame.”

Windblade cut her optics toward him, unable to keep from smirking. Bumblebee and Starscream had indeed been ‘fucking’ for a long time now. It seemed to be an open relationship, if Bumblebee’s comments about her and Starscream were anything to go by. She hoped it was an open relationship, anyway. It wouldn’t do anything for Starscream’s self-worth if Bumblebee was trying to foist him on someone else.

The door opened again, and when silence fell over the near-empty bar, Windblade picked her head up from her arms to gaze—blearily—at the entrance. “Oh. It’s you,” she said without surprise.

Slipstream eased into the room, her wings tucked up tight. Bumblebee got out of the way so that Slipstream could slide onto the stool next to her. “It’s me.” She nodded to Blurr. “I’ll have what she’s having.”

“It’s dreck,” Windblade said clearly. “Nothing on good Camien engex.”

“Is anything like the home brew? Thanks,” she slipped a credit chip to Blurr. Both Blurr and Bumblebee, sensing the possibility of good gossip, idled nearby, so Slipstream dimmed both optics and switched to their private line, the one Windblade had thought she deleted when they had broken up for the final time. **::Do we have to have an audience?::**

**::I don’t need any more news people seeing I’m overcharged in the early afternoon.::**

**::Fair enough.::** Slipstream looked up at the muted screen, but the chyron was still shrieking about LEADER WINDBLADE’S ‘GOOD TIME’ GONE BAD. **::Something to be said for our theocracy—no one would bother the Mistress with such nonsense.::**

Windblade’s wings flicked twice before they settled.** ::Lucky her.::**

**::Yeah.::** Slipstream sipped her engex and made a face. **::What wouldn’t I give for some of Nautica’s—::**

**::—Homebrewed, triple-distilled engex? _Same._:: **Windblade and Slipstream caught each other’s optics and looked away, hiding a smile. **::No one makes it like she does.::**

**::So where is Nautica? Is Chromia pining?::**

**::They broke up before Nautica left. Perfectly amicable, but since Nautica was flying out with a crew of Cybertronians in search of ‘The Knights of Cybertron’ and had no idea when she would return, they decided it was for the best.::**

**::The Knights of Cybertron? Even the Mistress of Flame thought they were a myth.::** Slipstream drained her glass and gestured for a refill. Blurr did so, disappointment writ large all over his frame that he couldn’t hear what they were talking about. Windblade liked Blurr, she really did, but like most Autobots, he was an invertebrate gossip. **::So do you miss her?::**

It was a loaded question. Windblade traced one of her fingers over the metal of the bar and tried not to think about the last messages the _Lost Light _crew had sent out. It had taken weeks to learn that they had survived—weeks in which Windblade and Chromia had been prostrate with grief but unable to show it publicly. Learning more about the circumstances about what had caused the last messages had been…She still didn’t have the words to effectively categorize how she felt. **::Absolutely. I wish she would come home.::**

Slipstream’s head jerked up. **::Home, as in Caminus? Or home, as in Cybertron?::**

Windblade met her optics. **::Cybertron is home now. I fought for it. I nearly died for it. It’s mine.::**

Slipstream’s wings flicked uncertainly. **::No wonder the Mistress of Flame despises you.::**

**::No, she despises me because I slagged off on Primes in her presence.::** As Slipstream’s jaw dropped, Windblade smirked. **::She slapped me and informed me I was no longer a Camien. Good thing the election worked out.::**

“Yes,” Slipstream murmured. “Anyway, I just came to see you because, well,” she nodded toward the screen. “I know you never liked public attention of that kind.”

“I’ve been informed that they’re delighting in it _because_ I’ve been so scandal-free,” Windblade said glumly. 

“You were always too good for the rest of us.” Slipstream pressed a kiss to Windblade’s cheek, a spark of pleasure dancing across her facial sensors. “I’m flying out in the morning. The Mistress of Flame is disappointed I haven’t been able to learn anything useful, so off I go.”

**::Let me guess, she found out about _that._:: **Windblade nodded toward the vid-screen.

Slipstream’s lips twisted into a dangerous (yet somewhat familiar) smirk. “Well, let’s just say it didn’t help. Solus keep you, Windblade.”

“And you,” Windblade murmured as Slipstream took her leave. “Good luck.”

As Slipstream left the bar, Windblade met the plaintive optics of Bumblebee and Blurr. “Do you have a deck of cards?” she sighed as she resettled herself in her chair. “I don’t really want to leave yet.”

Bumblebee’s optics brightened. “You know, I think I do.”

—

Windblade steeled herself before entering her personal code into her door. Bumblebee had messaged her that her rooms were done, and she wasn’t sure if she was ready to see what they had done. She didn’t have a choice—she had made a promise to herself that she wouldn’t recharge in her office. At least, not more than two cycles in a row.

She was verging on three, and if she started recharging in her office as a habit, she would never be able to break it. And it was ridiculous, to be so concerned about what Starscream had gotten done, except that she _knew_ his sense of decor and she did not want it in her living space.

She pushed her wings down from their defensive position and keyed in her code. The door slid open with a pneumatic hiss, and as she stepped in her foyer, she saw Starscream lounging at the small table. As she closed the door, the lowlights flared and she gaped at the golden walls. 

The spartan decorations were entirely gone. The walls had been coded to display soft gold, a color that caught the sunlight she loved so much and spread it throughout the space, making it look bigger. Her plain metal cabinet doors had been replaced with a pretty wrought iron and glass pattern, showing the cabinet’s contents without them being on full display.

“Are you going to gape all day?” Starscream demanded as he swirled some energon in a glass. It glinted green in the setting sun. “Is it not good enough?”

“No, it’s perfect,” she said quietly. “I’m admiring.”

Starscream met her optics, and his optics were burning with intent. Her wings fluttered nervously before she forcibly stilled them, and at the sign of weakness, his optics brightened a single shade. He placed his glass carefully on the table and rose in a fluid movement that made her intakes seize for a moment. “So just how are you going to thank me?”

He moved like a predator, she thought dizzily, and he was approaching _her_. She took a step back and stuttered, “I—I thought that Bumblebee helped.”

Starscream waved that away. “Like he has my optic for color.”

That steadied her, oddly enough. She glanced up and down his frame. “Oh really?”

He huffed. “Not everyone can pair these colors together and make it look new.”

“Are you slagging off Prime?” she asked, amused. 

“You said it, not me.” He was watching her with too much intent. The last time he looked like that…”How _are_ you going to thank me?”

“Did you do this merely for the gratitude?” she inquired, back on firmer footing now that he had insulted Prime and she understood their relationship again. “That’s unusual.”

“Well, not _just_ the gratitude.” He was too close. She could feel the heat emanating from him. 

“This is transference,” she said gently. “You weren’t ready for the merge.”

“It’s not,” he said.

“And just how do you know that?”

Her wings hit the wall—she hadn’t been aware of moving so far backward. He rested one hand over her shoulder, caging her in. “Because it predates the merge.”

She struggled briefly to control her feelings. “H-how long?” 

He rolled his optics. “Does it matter?”

“I suppose not,” she said meekly. 

He looked at her. “Nothing else to say?”

“Were you expecting anything else I would say?” she asked, confidence slowly seeping back in. There was no need to be nervous, this was _Starscream,_ and as impossible as he was, she was beginning to be able to anticipate him. He wanted a fight—or at least an argument. She could give him, happily.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he mocked, “it could ‘why me?’ or ‘How could I come to be so important that the all-powerful Starscream would even deign to care?’ Insert whatever you like.”

“I have a suspicion _you_ would like to insert whatever you liked,” she returned. His lush mouth curved into a smirk. “And no, I don’t need to wonder.” She sniffed in her best mimicry of him at his most imperious. “I _know_.”

Starscream’s hand moved from the wall to her shoulder, pinning her against the metal. His thumb rested lightly over her intakes, and she was into it in a way she hadn’t anticipated. “Oh, do you?”

She smiled at him, candy-sweet. “I’m irresistible.” Then, because the Mistress of Flame said her worst quality was her impetuousness, she leaned down and kissed the smirk off his face.

He hadn’t been expecting it. Their game, such as it was, had not been factored in for actual physical reciprocation, and his hand briefly tightened on her intakes before releasing her, and then he was kissing her back. She trailed her hands up his chassis (carefully, she didn’t want a blade to her intakes), and then he was grabbing her wrists and pinning them over her helm as he took control of the kiss with a vicious bite to her lower lip. She gasped, and he surged forward, small prickles of charge transferring from his mouth to hers. 

Her fans clicked on, and she used her wing turbines to push them away from the wall. “The paint job is new,” she gasped when she had him on the floor. She flared her wings out to increase her mass and to make it harder for him to throw her off. “I don’t want paint transfers on it.” Yet.

“Weakling,” he said, the satisfaction in his field undermining his words. His hands drifted to her hips and she arched as he reached through the seams in her armor plating to find some of her wires.

She was _very_ surprised when he twisted two wires around his fingers and her wings clamped down to her back. “How did—?”

He bucked his hips and threw her off of him. She caught herself on the floor, but then he was on top, his optics glimmering a ruby red that indicated the first level of his defensive protocols had been engaged. “I’ve fought a lot of flyers,” he said, “you learn a few things.” He straddled her and looked down with the air of a mech claiming his territory. “Let’s see…” He ran the tips of his fingers down the cabling of her sides, charge leaping up to meet his fingers. Behind her plating cover, her valve clenched down on nothing, and she arched her struts to ride out the wave of arousal.

The only problem with that, of course, was his panel was _right there_ and she was rubbing her panel _against his_ and she wanted to die. She hated it when partners went for the panel first thing, as if play wasn’t necessary to get their engines running, and she opened her mouth to apologize but then—

His panel slid open.

His panel slid open and his cord was already out, the tip glowing with charge. Had he been deliberately revving himself up as he waited for her? Or did he get off on arguing with her—yes, that was probably it. She hadn’t smelled any ozone when she got in. 

“Well?” Starscream demanded when he caught her staring at his cord. “Are you just going to admire it?”

Some primal part of her coding must have taken over her logic centers, because she heard herself say, “I want it in my mouth.”

Starscream’s optics cycled in surprise, and she was shocked at herself. She had never—she hadn’t thought—but no, she _had_ thought, once, not long after the merge, what Starscream’s face might look like if she took his cord into her mouth. She had wondered if he would be speechless, for once. If she could _make_ him speechless.

“Should I—?”

“No, this is fine,” that same primal coding was talking out of her logic centers. “I want you in control.”

And that must have been the right thing to say, because Starscream’s optics shifted to his more normal scarlet. He felt safe again.

With some clanging and maneuvering, he placed his thighs on either side of her face as she opened her mouth and relaxed her intakes. Her arms were free to touch him and she used them freely to run up and down his back struts. He was—not fully relaxed, but he didn’t flinch from her either. She doubted he was ever truly relaxed.

His cord was a little wider than she was used to, but two cycles of her jaw joints was enough to configure her mouth to his dimensions, and then he planted his hands on the floor over her head. She locked optics with him and nodded as best she could with her mouth full.

When he started to move, the sensors in her mouth lit up with the charge playing over the surface of his cord. He wasn’t thrusting deep enough for to hit the back of her intakes—the angle was wrong for that—but she was as powerless as she could be under the circumstances.

And he _loved_ it. He loved that her mouth was bulging with his cord, that her optics were brighter with the coiling charge, and that her hands were tight on his hips, urging him forward. She could feel his pleasure and satisfaction, and the charge was building up in his cord, and in a moment, it would—

Windblade’s optics shut off as charge roared through her helm. It was more like a secondary overload for the receiving partner in this position, enough to take the edge off but not actually enough, but Starscream didn’t move for several movements, his turbines and fans expelling the excess heat with a roar. 

She didn’t think she would ever be able to forget what his overload tasted like.

Slowly, with creaking joints, Starscream backed off. She sat up and urged her panel to open—with an overload like that, Starscream would be useless and her own charge was uncomfortable. He watched her with dimmed optics as she retracted her panel and took her cord in hand. “Do you mind?” she croaked. Her self-repair was hard at work on her voice box—he had done some damage there—but she was at least understandable.

“No.”

She nodded and focused on her cord. It was already lubricated, and sensors in her hands lit up as her cord’s charge built. She wasn’t as sensitive as a medic, but she was close, and sometimes she took more pleasure from her hands than her cord. She moved her hand faster, remembering Starscream’s pleasure at her helplessness (what a time to find out a kink, Windblade) and how it felt to be pinned to the floor by a cord in her mouth, and in no time at all, she threw her head back as charge rippled from her cord to her hands in a feedback loop of pure pleasure.

When her helm rebooted, she found Starscream studying her carefully. “I want art done,” he announced once he had her attention, “of what you look like in the midst of an overload.” He pointed at the wall. “It would look good right there.”

“In my kitchen?” she managed.

Starscream’s lips curved in one of his damnable smirks. “Because you look good enough to eat.”

—

Windblade took down two of her favorite additives, potassium and manganese, and mixed them into her energon. Starscream said that his current glass was good enough, and she didn’t argue with him. “In all seriousness, how long?” she asked finally as she stirred the energon together.

Starscream shifted in his chair. He had brushed off the worst of the paint transfers, but the look he was giving her was promising more paint transfers in the very near future. “Since Sentinel Prime and that bomb.”

Windblade paused. “But that was months ago!”

“I’m not used to people trying to save my life,” he shrugged. “And you would always give me those _smiles_, except when you were angry at me, but I started to find _both _ expressions appealing and you are the actual worst.”

She hid a smile. “And so you chose to show that by redecorating my apartment?”

“I wanted it to be someplace I wouldn’t mind being,” he said.

She turned to look at him, her lips twitching. “Oh really?”

“Really,” he confirmed as he stretched his arms over his head. His wings flared out in a _blatant_ dominance display, and she fought the instinct to spread her own wings in response. “Naturally, I’m going to be the prettiest thing here but I had to make sure my surroundings were worthy of me.”

“Next time,” she told him, “it will be _your_ mouth on my cord.” The prim and proper coding in her logic centers primarily curled up and deactivated, but he was smirking, and that was good. 

“I cannot wait to see you try,” he said.

Windblade sipped her energon and then said, “You won’t have to wait for long.”

And he didn’t.

**Author's Note:**

> Will I ever write smutfic of these two that doesn't delve into kink? _Probably not._


End file.
